The Kansas State Department of Education’s (KSDE) information technology staff will be gradually phasing in the Kansas Education Data System (KEDS) as a modernized, more parallel system for student data collection during the 2024-25 school year. 

Over the course of the next few months, KSDEweekly will feature a series of stories about aspects of the migration to KEDS from the current Kansas Individual Data on Students (KIDS) system. 

Background 

The Kansas Individual Data on Students (KIDS) system was implemented during the 2004-05 school year after State Student Identification (SSID) numbers were assigned to Kansas students just a few months earlier. This occurred in the early years of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) standardized testing.  

“You had to track the students individually and their assessments (for NCLB) and this is how you would do it,” said Julie Cook, KSDE information systems manager, adding that a student’s assessment data could more easily be tracked if they transferred to another district in Kansas. “It had to follow them and so that’s why a lot of these systems had to be built.”  

Prior to 2005, districts submitted their data in aggregate, mostly by paper, according to Cook. KSDE also collected discipline data through the KAN-DIS system.  

Dale Dennis, KSDE special assistant to the commissioner, said the agency’s early student data systems were created as a result of state statute. He said data collection has significantly changed over the years. For example, KSDE would have to ask the Kansas Department of Administration for help fulfilling data requests because they had a larger data system than KSDE did. Since the implementation of the KIDS system in 2004, KSDE has been able to fulfill data requests and manage all of its own data. 

Modernizing to KEDS 

While the KIDS system has been updated several times since its implementation 19 years ago, the efficiency of uploading data by districts hasn’t improved greatly, according to Jennifer Shaffer, KSDE assistant director of information technology. 

“It’s very time-consuming for the districts,” she said of the KIDS system, explaining there are several steps districts have to follow to upload their data which can leave room for mistakes that may not get corrected, resulting in inaccurate data submitted to KSDE.  

“People are wearing many hats and this is just one little piece of the many things on their plates,” Shaffer said of district staff. “There’s been a lot of turnover too, and we end up in a lot of situations where you have brand new people who are not only trying to learn their SIS (student information system) but also learn the state reporting side of it because currently it’s two very separate processes.”  

“Even though the (district) student information systems have done a really good job of exporting that (data), there are still places where there can be errors,” said Chris Fletcher, KSDE information systems manager. He said the migration of the student data from a district’s student information system to KSDE’s new KEDS system is mapped out to be more efficient, decreasing the time it takes to train a district staff member to upload the data and significantly reducing errors during the submission process.  

“They’ll be more focused on the data and not the process to upload it,” he said. “Hopefully the data will be better, and they’ll be able to submit that data right away.” 

“They won’t have to wait for collection windows to open up,” Shaffer added. “If it’s in their student information system, they can sync it up to us.” 

Shaffer said if a district continues to sync their data to KSDE throughout a school year with the new KEDS system, more data errors can be caught and corrected much sooner and a district’s end-of-year process for submitting data will be much easier. 

“If there are errors, it would be correcting the information in the SIS (at the district level) before it gets synced back up with us so then it’s right and future syncs are all okay,” she said.  

Shaffer said there will still be a process to detect “business logic errors” in the data that’s submitted to KSDE that districts can still check; however, she said the extract upload process will be eliminated with the new KEDS system. 

While the onboarding process to KEDS is slowly beginning, the KIDS system will continue to be the official source of student data for the 2024-25 school year. Additionally, Shaffer and the IT staff emphasize the KEDS system does not provide, KSDE direct access to districts’ data that is in their student information systems.

Email keds@ksde.org for more information.